Search form

You are here

Ban CIA Weather Manipulation

Submitted on 07 March 2015

Silvia Ribeiro*

In February 2015, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences along with other institutions published two reports on geoengineering (technological proposals to manipulate the climate) that were funded by, among others, the CIA.

The CIA and other sectors of the U.S. intelligence apparatus have called climate change and climate control matters of geopolitical strategy and national security. In 2009, the CIA even opened its own Center on Climate Change and National Security, but Congress ordered it closed in 2012. This is perhaps one of the reasons the agency, since 2013, has sponsored the Academy of Sciences' project. Many of the proposed geoengineering technologies have great potential for hostile use.

On January 19, 2011, Robock received a call from CIA consultants Roger Lueken and Michael Canes, who asked, among other things, whether other countries could be trying to control our climate, and if so, whether it would it be possible to detect it? Robock told them that if a large stratospheric cloud could be created and it was thick and durable enough to alter the amount of radiation reaching the earth, we could certainly detect it with the same ground-based instruments and satellites that we use to measure stratospheric clouds that result from volcanic eruptions. Other types of geoengineering, such as cloud whitening or the injection of gasses or particles into the atmosphere could likely be detected by existing satellites and radar systems. But the question that was left lingering for Robock is whether, rather than relating to the national security of the United States, these questions were really directed at whether other countries could detect it if the CIA was manipulating the climate.

Weather modification as a weapon of war has been on the agenda of the U.S. military and other great powers for decades. For example, Operation Popeye, conducted during the Vietnam War and now declassified, created rain over long periods of time, flooding roads and ruining the rice crop of the Vietnamese resistance. We also know that since that time, the U.S. government has conducted several projects to control hurricanes, and unlike Operation Popeye, it has not referred to them as for military use, although there is that potential. In 1996, the U.S. Air Force issued a comprehensive report on climate manipulation, suggestively titled, Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025.

Robock said that the last Quadrennial Defense Review, published by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2014, reaffirms that climate change is a major threat to the United States and the world. The document states: "The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world. These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions - conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."

It's not surprising and indeed, very menacing, that a government dedicated to promoting war around the world and which feeds and nourishes the largest military-industrial complex on the globe also intends to use the climate for its own purposes.